Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

"“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,”
he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not
proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

“We
will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear
into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our
doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not
from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend
causes that were for the moment unpopular.”

And so good night, and good luck."

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Who will introduce Sen. Warner as he holds a town meeting in Second Life? Is Second Life a democracy? Is it a libertarian utopia? Is FDR the President? Is Kerry? I know nothing about other than the fact that it doesn't actually exist physically. Will people's avatars get a vote in the real world? Will people stay in character as they ask questions or will their role playing personalities hold sway? And if so will the answers they hear translate to their other selves? Will they stop having sex with virtual escorts in order to attend the Town Hall meeting? If there were a game (and there probably is) called Confederacy Life would Sen. Allen be in charge?

OMG - 1.6+ million Flickr photos geotagged in the first 32 hours. A flickr screencast called GeoTags & You tells how to do it. I know at least one friend, who I suspect, will spend hours and hours doing this.

August 29, 2006

The point tracker on the US Open's site is very cool. I watched the Agassi match using it last night and was on the edge of my seat as the tie-breaker played out. I have no idea how they are doing this in real time. It tracks the line and ball speed. You can change your point of view (though I like the default), the number of hits, and more.

"We touch 25 or 26 million people a month," he says, "and a very
minimal number of them are technologically savvy.... Our median age
online is 44 or 45 years old. So we have to find ways to bring people
into the loop who don't know what a tag cloud is."

Paris Hilton's YouTube channel is sponsored by the Prison Break. That's funny. We saw Judy Holliday in "It Should Happen To You" on Friday night at Lincoln Center. You Tube is filled with Gladys Glovers.

August 26, 2006

"Hyde Post, VP-Internet, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, lists four key audience drivers: urgency, utility, visual energy and community interaction - which is about the most concise and compelling summary of effective web content I’ve read." from paidcontent's post about a new survey about how newspapers can build their share.

I was recently in a meeting about mobile where someone said their criteria was "does it make me laugh, help me get laid (sic), or save my life." which is also in its own way a very concise and compelling criteria for mobile. You have to stretch the definition of saving a life to football scores but if you can, then it works.

August 25, 2006

The first clue, lesson number one from human history on the subject of nonviolence, is that there is no word for it. The concept has been praised by every major religion. Throughout history there have been practitioners of nonviolence. Yet, while every major language has a word for violence, there is no word to express the idea of nonviolence except that it is not another idea; it is not violence. In Sanskrit, the word for violence is himsa, harm, and the negation of himsa, just as nonviolence is the negation of violence, is ahimsa, not doing harm. But if ahimsa is not doing harm, what is it doing?

The only possible explanation for the absence of a proactive word to express nonviolence is that not only the political establishments but the cultural and intellectual establishments of all societies have viewed nonviolence as a marginal point of view, a fanciful rejection of one of society's key components, a repudiation of something important, but not a serious force in itself. It is not an authentic concept but simply the abnegation of something else. It has been marginalized because it is one of the rare truly revolutionary ideas, an idea that seeks to completely change the nature of society, a threat to the established order. and it has always been treated as something profoundly dangerous.

- Mark Kurlansky in his article NonViolence; the hidden history of a revolutionary idea, in the Sept/Oct issue of Orion. (The one complaint I have is that his bio mentions his book on 1968 but leaves out Salt, Cod, and The Big Oyster. I don't think that authoring three best-sellers about culinary history detract from his activist bonafides)

August 24, 2006

Blogs are alive with commentary on a Forbes article called Men Don't Marry Career Women that was linked to, and commented on, by Boing Boing. Technorati returns over 203 posts about the article. Forbes in response to the derisive posts from Boing Boing, Huffington Post, and Gawker (complete with reworked slideshow), and probably members of it's own staff, has now split the page in half to include a response from Elizabeth Corcoran, a reporter in their Silicon Valley bureau. They also have linked to a forum area for discussion. What I find interesting about this is how empty the forums are versus the conversation that is going on all over the web. They are still following a magazine centric idea that they are the conversation and therefore that commentary should take place on their pages. It would have been better for them to put a Technorati or Sphere widget on the page to direct people to the real conversation.

August 23, 2006

I've been in too many meetings lately where someone says "This is the year of the Internet for us". Um, hello? Well someone else thinks it is the year of the Internet and has now gobbled up another content network to add to their over 8 million urls. Have you ever clicked on a sponsored link, let alone a sponsored link on a site you don't really want to be on?

What is the over/under on how long it takes 10,000 Reasons Civilization is Doomed to reach 10,000 reasons now that kottke.org is linking to it? One week? A week and a half? How long until they sell a book? One week? How long until they add categories and search so people don't repeat themselves? Or if they don't sell a book how long until they add some Google ads and open up comments so people can argue about whether reasons belong on the list? (As I was posting this kottke.org changed to kitty.orgy and I know I didn't type that- weird)

August 21, 2006

TED Blog is being highlighted by Typepad today. It is the work of Apperceptive which is led by two immensely talented people - David Jacobs and John Emerson. The blog has a post about Natalie MacMaster who I got to see at Celebrate Brooklyn this year (and last on Canada Day), as the post on TED Blog says, if she is playing near you - drop everything.

...In short, we don't have a company creation crisis. But we might have a company destruction
crisis. Something is off in our ecosystem - there's simply not enough
failure out there right now. For an ecosystem to be truly healthy, bad
ideas (or good ideas poorly executed) need to fail, so we can all learn
from the failure, incorporate the lessons, and move on.

...The power law also explains why it is bad
idea to be the twentieth social networking site or VoIP phone company
even if #1 was just purchased for a gazillion dollars. Let’s assume that a gazillion means a $24 million just to make the math easy. Power law says that #2 is worth $12,000,000 (still not bad), #3 is worth $8,000,000 (you’d get by even after your VCs’ cut). But #20 is worth only $1.2 million. When you check the liquidation preference (see Brad Feld on this) in your financing, you’ll find that you don’t get any of that – it all goes to the investors and they won’t even be happy.

The lengthening tail affects copy-cat entrepreneurs as well as authors. The
ever lower cost of starting and running an Internet business means that
#20 will always have to contend with #21 through #50 if it looks like
any money is going to made in the category. Tough to get the investors’ money back. Actually,
since so much of the value is at the head of the curve when talking
about network businesses, it is impossible for any but a handful of
network business to succeed within a category.

August 18, 2006

More interesting is the fact that Antenna Audio, a fantastic audio tour creator, is now owned by Discovery Communications. This probably brings could mean all the "synergies" that being connected to a televised travel channel can bring, plus some financial security. If you feel like moving to Sausalito, CA. to be their VP Creative Director, this is probably a wonderful job. Readers of this blog know that I am very interested in audio and multi-media tours (though I am not interested in moving), and that I have cryptically referred to a project I am doing with the GPTMC in Philadelphia. It is going to launch in mid-September so soon I will be able to gush about it.

August 17, 2006

Thinking about Voyager a bit right now so I checked out what Bob Stein and his Institute for the Future of the Book were up to. It seems, quite a lot! From the amazing header on their blog, to the upcoming release of Sophie- the next gen version of the Expanded Book Toolkit, plus two very interesting networked books. The move to broadband and the omnipresence of flash have done nothing to advance the types of layered projects Voyager was publishing. Sophie may be the link between those projects and the fantastic collaborative components of wikis and other new apps, so I hope it is a hit.

So yesterday I wrote of the N Generation, and today David Pogue lands me firmly in the Transition Generation in his article about the Teac 350 which puts records and tapes onto a CD. We are moving and are in the process of throwing out records and cassettes, at least most of the cassettes we won't want to listen to into our car which is also an artifact from the 80's.

August 15, 2006

Today on WNYC I heard; that musical tastes are somewhat set after 30, that if one isn't pierced by their early twenties it isn't going to happen, and if you haven't had Sushi by the time you are 40 you aren't likely to try it. (I may be getting some of these ages wrong but listen to it for yourself.) The story talked about how as we age we may lose our sense of adventure and it tied in well with a new study about the "N Generation" from Interrepublic called, "The New ‘Digital Divide’: How the New Generation of Digital Consumers
Are Transforming Mass Communication” ClickZ (via PaidContent). The study looked at 16-49 year-old "power-users" who
accessed the Internet at least 11 times in seven days and found; that 71 percent of them are involved with blogs, and are three times more likely to be so than the next age bracket up, and that twice as many of the them belong to a social networking site. So given that, it is really interesting to see the vlogging being done on YouTube by an older Englishman called Geriatric1927 who doesn't look like he has any piercings but who is definitely trying something new.

Geritaric 1927 is making videos and telling stories from his life, and what I find fascinating are the number of people not only commenting, but making videos in response to his videos. I usually go to YouTube, check out what is most popular, and watch short silly videos, so this was new to me. I first noticed the creations of video responses last week when I saw a short video of a girl who made an emo video. This may have been a parody, she spoke very slowly about no one understanding goths and outsiders, and how someone was taking someone else to the prom. In their responses people were trying to outdo themselves with depressed monologues, and one or two, if they were serious, seemed to be in need of help.

This video response to a video is amazing, it is a forum of messaging but unlike the comments one can leave on a board it isn't threaded. Each video is its own entry and has its own set of comments but I digress. The remarkable things is that so many people have access and the wherewithal to sit down and create video responses with what looks like the same effort as leaving a comment. Some of these responses are very short as in "nice video", others are more drawn out and filled with advice. Geriatric1927 is talking to the N Generation, he is reaching out. Perhaps he was lonely but with thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of viewings he should have some comfort. His video has helped bridge the divide even more as he had elicited response from other members of his generation, these are mostly other older men, so far no older women.

It is the mass response that is so special about Geriatric1927's efforts. In many ways he is leaving us a record similar to the recorded interviews that StoryCorps creates, but he is reaching a different audience. StoryCorps plays highlights of interviews on NPR, sends the audio documents created in its booths home with the people who were recorded, and sends a copy to to the Smithsonian, but it is not truly shared in such a mass way. For this it is the magic of YouTube as it exists right now, the unexpected stew that enables someone born before television but adventurous and younger than his years to elicit a video response from someone born in the nineteen nineties.

August 10, 2006

MyApartmentMap.com - Google/Craigslist mashup. Let's you look for rentals and see where they are. The site also seems to take listings. Enjoy the fact that much of Brooklyn is in fact Park Slope. (via Curbed)